Betrayal

Should we hate Judas Iscariot?

Caravaggio’s “The Taking of Christ.” Judas, Christianity’s primary image of human evil, is now the subject of a rehabilitation effort.Credit Art by National Gallery of Ireland

At the Last Supper, Jesus knew that it would be the last, and that he would be dead by the next day. Each of the Evangelists tells the story differently, but, according to John, Jesus spent the time he had left re-stating to the disciples the lessons he had taught them and trying to prop up their courage. At a certain point, however, he lost heart. “Very truly,” he said to his men, “one of you will betray me.” Who? they asked. And he answered, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” He then dipped a piece of bread into a dish and handed it to Judas Iscariot, a disciple whom the Gospels barely mention before the scene of the Last Supper but who now becomes very important. Once Judas takes the bread, Satan “entered into” him, John says. Is that a metaphor, meaning that Jesus’ prediction enables Judas to betray him? Maybe so, maybe not, but Jesus soon urges him directly. “Do quickly what you are going to do,” he says. And so Judas gets up from the table and leaves. That night (or perhaps even before the Last Supper), he meets with the priests of the Temple, makes the arrangements for the arrest, and collects his reward, the famous thirty pieces of silver.

That is the beginning of Jesus’ end, and of Judas’s. Jesus is arrested within hours. Judas, stricken with remorse, returns to the priests and tries to give them back their money. They haughtily refuse it. Judas throws the coins on the floor. He then goes out and hangs himself. He dies before Jesus does.

Did Judas deserve this fate? If Jesus informs you that you will betray him, and tells you to hurry up and do it, are you really responsible for your act? Furthermore, if your act sets in motion the process—Christ’s Passion—whereby humankind is saved, shouldn’t somebody thank you? No, the Church says. If you betray your friend, you are a sinner, no matter how foreordained or collaterally beneficial your sin. And, if the friend should happen to be the Son of God, so much the worse for you.

For two thousand years, Judas has therefore been Christianity’s primary image of human evil. Now, however, there is an effort to rehabilitate him, the result, partly, of an archeological find. In 1978 or thereabouts, some peasants digging for treasure in a burial cave in Middle Egypt came upon an old codex—that is, not a scroll but what we would call a book, with pages—written in Coptic, the last form of ancient Egyptian. The book has been dated to the third or fourth century, but scholars believe that the four texts it contains are translations of writings, in Greek, from around the second century. When the codex was found, it was reportedly in good condition, but it then underwent a twenty-three-year journey through the notoriously venal antiquities market, where it suffered fantastic abuses, including a prolonged stay in a prospective buyer’s home freezer. (This caused the ink to run when the manuscript thawed.) The book was cracked in half, horizontally; pages were shuffled, torn out. By the time the codex reached the hands of restorers, in 2001, much of it was just a pile of crumbs. The repair job took five years, after which some of the book was still a pile of crumbs. Many passages couldn’t be read.

And then there was the strangeness of what could be read. In the twentieth century, Bible scholars repeatedly had to deal with ancient books—the Dead Sea scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library—that surfaced from the sands of the Middle East to wreak havoc with orthodoxy. These books said that much of what we call Christian doctrine predated Christ; that the universe was created by a female deity, and so on. The 1978 find—called the Codex Tchacos, for one of its successive owners, Frieda Tchacos Nussberger—was even more surprising, because one of its texts, twenty-six pages long, was entitled “The Gospel of Judas.” It wasn’t written by Judas. (We don’t know if there was a historical Judas Iscariot.) It was a story about Judas, and in it the great villain, the Christ-killer, was portrayed as Jesus’ favorite disciple, the only one who understood him.

The Codex Tchacos, like the Nag Hammadi library, was the work of an ancient religious party, mostly Christian, that we call Gnostic. In the second century, Christianity was not an institution but a collection of warring factions, each with its own gospels, each claiming direct descent from Jesus, each accusing the others of heresy, homosexuality, and the like. In the fourth century, one group, or group of groups, won out: the people now known as the proto-orthodox, because, once they won, their doctrines became orthodoxy. The proto-orthodox were centrist. They embraced both the Hebrew Bible and the new law proclaimed by Jesus; they said that Jesus was both God and man; they believed that the world was both full of blessings and full of sin. Of the many gospels circulating, they chose four, called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which, by reason of their realism and emotional directness—their lilies of the field and prodigal sons—were most likely to appeal to regular people.

The Gnostics were different—visionary, exclusionary. They scorned the Hebrew Bible; they said that the world was utterly evil; they claimed that the key to salvation was not faith or good behavior but secret knowledge, which was their exclusive property. The Gospel of Judas is entirely in line with this view. In it, most people have no hope of getting to Heaven. As for Jesus, he was not a man but wholly divine, and therefore Judas didn’t really have him killed. (Only a mortal can be killed.) According to some commentators, this Jesus asked Judas to release him from the human form he had assumed in order to descend to earth. Judas did him a favor.

That supposed exoneration of Judas was the most exclaimed-over aspect of the Gospel of Judas. Far more shocking, however, was the book’s portrait of Jesus. We know Jesus from the New Testament as an earnest and charitable man. Here, by contrast, he is a joker, and not a nice one. Three times in this brief text, he bursts into laughter over his disciples’ foolishness. The first time, he comes upon them as they are celebrating the Eucharist. What’s so funny? they ask him—this is what we’re supposed to do. Maybe according to your god, Jesus says. But you represent our God, they say. You’re his son. Jesus now turns on them. What makes you think you know me? he asks them. “Truly I say to you, no generation of the people that are among you will know me.” In other words, Jesus tells them that they are strangers to him. The next day, they ask him about Heaven, and he laughs at them again. Forget about Heaven, he says. No mortal will go there. In response, the disciples “did not find a word to say.”

No wonder, for Jesus has just denied what is said to have been his sole mission on earth, the salvation of humankind. Later, he relents, a little: he says that some few mortals may be admitted to Heaven. The text is hard to read here, but it appears that this elect is limited to the Gnostics.

Jesus’ dealings with the disciples occupy about half of the surviving pages of the Gospel of Judas. The rest consists of a lecture that Jesus gives on cosmology—an account quite different from the Bible’s. Briefly, the real God did not create the earth, but he spawned an angel, who created thousands of other angels. Twelve “aeons” and seventy-two “luminaries” also came into existence, and each luminary was supplied with five firmaments, for a total of three hundred and sixty. This cosmos, as grand as it sounds, is described by Jesus as “corruption,” but apparently it is not as bad as the earth, which was brought into being by a violent demiurge, Nebro, and his stupid assistant, Saklas. The text goes on in this vein. N. T. Wright, in his book “Judas and the Gospel of Jesus: Have We Missed the Truth about Christianity?” (2006), says that as a churchman—he is the Bishop of Durham—he often gets letters that sound like the Judas gospel’s explanation of the universe: “Some are handwritten, in which case they are mostly in green ink. Some are typewritten, page after page of interminable cosmological speculation, with increasing amounts of block capitals and underlinings.”

What use could this bizarre document be to modern Christians? Plenty. Many American religious thinkers are more liberal than their churches. They wish that Christianity were more open—not a stone wall of doctrine. To these people, the Gospel of Judas was a gift. As with the other Gnostic gospels, its mere existence showed that there was no such thing as fixed doctrine, or that there wasn’t at the beginning.

That implicit endorsement of tolerance was probably what American scholars valued most in the Judas gospel, but the discovery gave them something else as well: righteous glee. What a joy to have an ancient document in which the man singled out in the Bible as Christianity’s foremost enemy turns out, arguably, to be Christ’s best friend. Hooray! The higher-ups don’t know everything! This was also the appeal of the new gospel to the political left. For people who claimed that the world was ruled by groups that controlled by marginalizing other groups, the Gospel of Judas was like a keystone being hammered into place. Men had silenced women, colonialists had silenced the colonized, and now we saw the Christian Church establishing itself by silencing other Christian voices.

The gospel’s enthusiasts had a narrower political purpose, too. The most important fact about Judas, apart from his betrayal of Jesus, is his connection with anti-Semitism. Almost since the death of Christ, Judas has been held up by Christians as a symbol of the Jews: their supposed deviousness, their lust for money, and other racial vices. The Bible scholar Louis Painchaud has said that the current fad for rehabilitating Judas is a consequence of collective guilt over these slanders and, above all, over the Holocaust. This must be true, at least in part. For anyone seeking to defend and protect the Jews, disproving Judas’s guilt would seem a good place to start, and here was an ancient gospel that appeared to support such a revision.

A number of people made special efforts to see that these lessons were learned. The restoration, translation, and publication of the Gospel of Judas were paid for, in large measure, by the National Geographic Society. This was an extremely expensive project, and the society wanted the gospel valued accordingly—that is, as a bombshell. In the same month, April of 2006, that the society published the first English translation, it also aired a television special and brought out a book—Herbert Krosney’s “The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot”—proclaiming the document’s utterly revolutionary character. “It could create a crisis of faith,” one expert said on the TV show. In both that show and the Krosney book, a lot of sensationalist formulas—the voice from the beyond, the race against time, the some may call it treason—get a vigorous workout.

The trumpet calls were not confined to the mass media. Even the gospel’s translators may have felt the need to augment its revisionist credentials. When Jesus, in the gospel, tells the disciples that no mortal, or almost none, will be saved, one assumes that Judas will be an exception, and that’s what National Geographic’s translators said in the first English edition. But then a number of other scholars took a look at the Coptic text and objected that this was a misreading. The translators must have seen their point, because in the second edition of their version, published last year, the line has been changed—to mean the opposite. Jesus now says to Judas, “You will not ascend on high” to join those in Heaven. In other passages, too, the second edition tells a widely different story from the first.

In fairness, no expert can tell us exactly what the Coptic said. That is not just because of the terrible condition of the codex; even when the words are there, they are often enigmatic. But, as April DeConick, a professor of Biblical studies at Rice University, pointed out in the Times in 2007, there was a troubling consistency to a number of the mistranslations in the first edition: they improved Judas’s image. If the gospel was truly the earth-shaking document that the National Geographic Society claimed it was—if it promoted Judas from villain to hero—then to have him denied admission to Heaven would be decidedly awkward.

Other scholars have solved the nosalvation problem—Judas’s and ours—in other ways. In “Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity” (2007), Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, two prominent scholars of Gnosticism, refuse to believe that Judas is not going to be rewarded for his services to Christ. In a retranslation of the Judas gospel, by King, that they append to their book, Judas is told that he’s going to Heaven, and that’s that. There is not even a note to explain this departure from the revised National Geographic translation, which, as the authors acknowledge, they saw prior to its publication.

“The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed” (2006), by Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, came out too early to have to deal with the National Geographic team’s second thoughts, but Ehrman, in his writings on the gospel, obviously did worry about the statement that just about nobody would be saved. He claims it’s not true that Jesus said that; then he says it’s true; then he says it’s not true—all on a single page. But never mind, he concludes: “Some of us have a spark of the divine within, and when we die, we will burst forth from the prisons of our bodies and return to our heavenly home . . . to live glorious and exalted lives forever.” I like that quiet “some.” Maybe not most of us, maybe not you or me, but some of us.

Cumulatively, the commentaries on the Judas gospel are amazing in their insistence on its upbeat character. Jesus ridicules his disciples, denounces the world, and says that most of us will pass away into nothingness. Hearing this, Judas asks why he and his like were born—a good question. Jesus evades it. The fact that liberal theologians have managed to find hope in all this is an indication of how desperately, in the face of the evangelical movement, they are looking for some crack in the wall of doctrinaire Christianity—some area of surprise, uncertainty, that might then lead to thought.

The supposedly good new Judas of the Codex Tchacos of course reawakened interest in the bad old Judas of the Bible. Was he really a villain, or just a scapegoat? Susan Gubar, a professor of English at Indiana University, has labored for years in the service of historical justice. With Sandra M. Gilbert, she wrote “The Madwoman in the Attic” (1979) and the three-volume “No Man’s Land” (1989-94), basic sourcebooks for those who, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, were trying to put together a history of women writers omitted from the Anglo-American canon. Since that time, she has written on the literature of the Holocaust and of American racism. Now she has produced “Judas: A Biography” (Norton; $27.95). Refreshingly, the book takes a cold view of the Gospel of Judas. Why all this fuss, Gubar asks, about a positive representation of Judas? There have been many such representations of him, she says, together with negative ones. That winding history is the subject of her book.

In the beginning, Judas had no defenders: as Gubar sees it, each successive Evangelist makes him look worse. By the time of John, in the final Gospel, he is called the Son of Perdition, the same words that Paul had used to describe the Antichrist. Also, John adds what will become a crucial detail: Judas’s professional connection with money. He keeps the “common purse”—the small fund that Jesus and the disciples used for their ministry—and he pilfers from it.

It wasn’t just Judas who was being condemned here. Jesus and all his disciples were Jewish, and they saw themselves as faithful Jews. If they disagreed with the priests of the Temple on certain matters—notably, their belief that Jesus was the Messiah—so did many other Jewish sects of the time. The Christian Jews held to their Jewishness for decades after Christ’s death. Then a change occurred. For a century after the Roman invasion of Judea, in 63 B.C., many Jews believed that this was only a temporary affront. They mounted rebellions against Roman rule, but when the fiercest of these, the Great Jewish Revolt (66-73 A.D.), resulted in a total rout of the Jews, and in the burning of Jerusalem’s Second Temple—which was not only the headquarters of the Jewish religion but also the seat of the Jews’ law courts and the repository of their literature—the people lost heart, and the followers of Christ began to feel that it would be prudent to make friends with the Romans, by disassociating themselves from the Jews. Furthermore, most of their converts were coming from among the Gentiles. Why confuse them by making them think they were joining a Jewish organization?

For these reasons, among others, a small, pious Jewish sect began to claim that it was itself a religion, distinct from—even opposite to—Judaism. Such a decision was, of course, accompanied by considerable anxiety. How to walk away from one’s origins, one’s mother? One way was to identify Judaism with a special, external evil, and this is where Judas came in. In early Christian documents, he is like something out of a monster movie. Here is a portrait of him that has been attributed to Papias, a secondcentury bishop in Asia Minor:

Judas was a dreadful, walking example of impiety in this world, with his flesh bloated to such an extent that he could not walk through a space where a wagon could easily pass. . . . His eyelids were so swollen that it was absolutely impossible for him to see the light and his eyes could not be seen by a physician, even with the help of a magnifying glass, so far had they sunk from their outward projection. His private parts were shamefully huge and loathsome to behold and, transported through them from all parts of his body, pus and worms flooded out together as he shamefully relieved himself.

Judas’s physical repulsiveness was generalized to the Jews—for who were they, as St. Jerome said, but “the sons of Judas”?—and so was the love of money that prompted him to betray Jesus. “Shall I tell you of their plundering, their covetousness, their abandonment of the poor, their thefts, their cheating in trade?” St. John Chrysostom preached.

In the Renaissance and after, Gubar believes, portrayals of Judas become more secular, and more nuanced. Some artists, she says, show Judas and Christ as friends, and more. To make this point, she focusses on two paintings of the Judas kiss, the action by which Judas identified Christ for the police. In Caravaggio’s “The Taking of Christ” (1602-03), she writes, the subject is not so much the betrayal of Christ by his disciple but the victimization of both by the state: “We see Jesus as well as Judas overwhelmed by repressive modes of social control that define both of them as delinquent, criminal, outcast, anathema to the morally bankrupt but highly effective policing authority of the civic state.” What is the state enforcing here? She finds an answer in Ludovico Carracci’s “The Kiss of Judas” (1589-90), a lost painting that survives in a copy by a follower. She calls this canvas “possibly the most startling recreation of the Passion scene,” and it is indeed a surprise: a frankly erotic portrayal, with Jesus, in an off-the-shoulder robe, looking beautiful and dazed as Judas embraces him. The picture sends Gubar into an erotic reverie: “It is Judas’s right hand that gives the picture its extraordinary poignancy, for the fingers hold Jesus’ neck with delicacy, the brush of Judas’s fingertips barely touching Jesus’ skin. . . . I linger on the glamorous lassitude of the ephebe or androgyne and his rapt mate.” Jesus and Judas are “enraptured by distinct visions of excess,” she says. In other words, they are having sexual fantasies about each other. Given this, the arrest becomes an act of homophobia.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Gubar writes, Judas was revised according to the leading political passion of the day. He becomes a revolutionary, bent on throwing the Romans out of Judea. This Judas believed that Jesus had the same intention; that’s why he joined up with him. Then he had to listen to a lot of sermons about love and turning the other cheek. In this reading, Judas betrays Jesus in order to force his hand, get him to launch the revolution. That scenario has been popular with twentieth-century filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, in “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel.

In the twentieth century, it does notneed to be said, anti-Semitism achieved a climax. Some historians have claimed that the image of Judas in the European mind was central to the Nazis’ decision to exterminate the Jews—that he was, in Gubar’s words, the “muse of the Holocaust.” The Nazis did stress Judas’s Judaism, and tried to forget Christ’s. In 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English writer who eventually married one of Wagner’s daughters and took German citizenship, published a book claiming that Jesus was not Jewish. Galilee, Chamberlain wrote, was inhabited in ancient times by heathen tribes, and Jesus was descended from them. German theologians took to making the same argument, and this made it easier to kill Jews. Gubar believes that the image of Judas as a man who would do anything for money lurks behind Nazi propaganda films, above all the popular “Jew Süss” (1940), a tale of the eighteenth-century German Jewish banker Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who gained control of the finances of the duchy of Württemberg—the movie shows him leering, pop-eyed, as he pours coins out of a money bag—and was later hanged. This film was screened for the S.S. and for the citizens of occupied towns before special “actions” against the Jews.

By the same token, postwar recoil from anti-Semitism (and, no doubt, the widespread abandonment of faith in the twentieth century) was good for Judas’s reputation. Several distinguished writers—Kazantzakis, Jorge Luis Borges, José Saramago—present him, or seem to, either as a hero, of the resistance-fighter sort, or as a suffering witness. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master & Margarita” (1966-67), written before the Second World War, Judas is just a young man, who, after receiving his pay from the Temple, goes off, in sandals so new that they squeak, to rendezvous with a woman. Meanwhile, Pontius Pilate, pained that he washed his hands of Jesus and wanting to punish someone for this, mobilizes his secret police, who get Judas’s lady to lead them to him. They butcher him. Significantly, this happens in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Judas turned Jesus over to the authorities. As the episode ends, Judas’s body lies forsaken in the dirt, but a ray of moonlight shines on one of the dearly bought sandals “so that each thong. . . was clearly visible. The garden thundered with nightingale song”—a scene both poignant and dry.

Between the mid-twentieth century and the present, Gubar’s effort to make sense of the history of Judas representations breaks down, because the evidence is too sparse, and too ambiguous, in the modern manner. But the book hits trouble long before it arrives at the modern period, and I think this is because it is essentially an amateur enterprise. Gubar is a literary scholar. Judas is far less important in literature than he is in the visual arts and, needless to say, theology. Again and again, Gubar fails to see her evidence in its proper context. Renaissance artists, she says, turned away from the “earlier stylized portrayals” of the Judas kiss, and began producing more realistic representations, with closeups and facial expressions. That would be an interesting fact about Renaissance paintings of Judas if it were not true of all Renaissance paintings. Likewise with the hints of homophilic feeling that she sees in Caravaggio’s “The Taking of Christ.” To Gubar, this means that, by the sixteenth century, Judas is being reconceived as Christ’s equal, his lover. But it may mean little more than that the painting is by Caravaggio. Hints, and more than hints, of homosexuality appear in a large number of his paintings. That’s why many scholars believe that he was homosexual—a fact unmentioned in Gubar’s book.

The more Gubar doesn’t know, the bolder she becomes in her interpretations. Looking at Giotto’s “Betrayal of Christ” (circa 1305), probably the most famous painting of the Judas kiss, she decides that this Judas is overweight—a telling fact, she believes. “The plump face of Judas, as well as his corpulent frame beneath the enveloping robe, warns that the kiss might be an incorporating bite.” It’s not enough that he betrays Jesus; he wants to eat him. Neo-Freudianism is what pushes Gubar down that rabbit hole, but normally the source of her caprices is just postmodern politics:

A male Eve, Judas—rejecting or accepting, promoting or curtailing Jesus’ potency—inhabits a decidedly queer place in the Western imaginary. To the extent that Judas stands for the poser or passer—a person who is not what he seems to be—he reflects anxieties about all sorts of banned or ostracized groups, not just Jews. An apostle in an all-male circle, associated with anality and with the disclosure of secrets, Judas retains his masculinity. . . . At other times and in diverse contexts, though, Judas represents a range of quite various and variously stigmatized populations—criminals, heretics, foreigners, Africans, dissidents, the disabled, the suicidal, the insane, the incurably ill, the agnostic. Members of these groups, too, have been faulted for posing or passing as (alien) insiders. Potentially convertible, all such outcasts might be thought to be using camouflaging techniques to infiltrate, hide out, assimilate, and thereby turn a treacherous trick.

Really? The incurably ill are turning tricks? Good for them!

This is shocking nonsense—argument by incantation—but its import is clear: Judas represents all the oppressed, and Gubar is there to defend them.

Yet it is Gubar who raises a crucial question unasked in most of the recent writings on Judas: Why shouldn’t we entertain the idea of an archetypal betrayer? In Gubar’s view, the original, Biblical Judas may have had a bad influence on our politics, but he does represent something true about our lives. He testifies, she says, to the “distressing nature of the human condition,” our “capacity for faltering and sinning” and then for despair and self-hatred—which, somehow, don’t prevent us from faltering and sinning again. Many of us, on many occasions, are not going to love one another. If this widely acknowledged fact is personified by one figure in the New Testament, why shouldn’t it be?

The alternative is to revise the Bible. Some religious scholars think that this is a good idea. Regina M. Schwartz, in her book “The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism” (1997), argues that the Old Testament’s endorsement of violence—the fruit, she says, of monotheism, with its intolerance—has been so destructive that we should delete it from the text and “produce an alternative Bible . . . embracing multiplicity instead of monotheism.” The religious scholar Willis Barnstone’s “The Restored New Testament,” which will be published in the fall, includes not only the canonical Gospels but also three Gnostic gospels: those of Thomas and Mary Magdalene, from Nag Hammadi, and the Gospel of Judas. But, if we’re going to start rewriting the Bible, where will that end? What is the Old Testament except a story about monotheism? And what is the Passion without a sinner to set it in motion? Was Jesus crucified by people who were being good? And, if Judas is let off the hook, surely we have to reconsider the guilt of the Roman soldiers—not to speak of the mob, for they were Jews, surely a group deserving special consideration here.

All this, I believe, is a reaction to the rise of fundamentalism—the idea, Christian and otherwise, that every word of a religion’s founding document should be taken literally. This is a childish notion, and so is the belief that we can combat it by correcting our holy books. Those books, to begin with, are so old that we barely understand what their authors meant. Furthermore, because of their multiple authorship, they are always internally inconsistent. Finally, even the fundamentalists don’t really take them literally. People interpret, and cheat. The answer is not to fix the Bible but to fix ourselves. ♦

Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker, mostly on books and dance, since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998.